Lots of happenings to follow, still watching WW3 in slow motion, Biden’s handlers pardoning his son, and Trump’s cabinet taking shape. Lots of thoughts and reactions brewing. Biggest one is: the IC’s Dirty 51 (Hayden, Brennan, Polymeropolous, et al) should be worried about Trump’s potential FBI Director, and Attorney General coming for them. And Musk’s DOGE should have lots of bureaucrats worried about their futures. More as those issues develop.
In the meantime, as I get around to sharing the occasional series of excerpts from my book, Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment, here’s Chapter 3.
In this chapter, I lay out the assumptions, failures, misuses, abuses and tragic results of intelligence and law enforcement relying on physiological lie detection fantasies.
Body-based Deception Detection has Failed
We’ve wasted a century with misplaced confidence in techniques that observe and/or measure body parts (brains, blood pressure, faces, legs, arms, eyes, hands, sweat, lungs, and more) to detect deception. Government-led reliance on these methods has created a dysfunctional environment. Practitioners who know that these methods don’t work go along with the charade of using them, and rely on their own personal judgements. Or they believe the methods work, and are constantly dumb-founded when failures occur. Either way, pretending these methods are useful is a massive waste of resources—time, money, and people’s energy. Such reliance causes immeasurable harm to people, society, and governments. Every day, around the world, intelligence, law enforcement, and other government professionals must make decisions, and take actions, based on their own assessments of the truthfulness of subjects. These actions can have harsh consequences for those adjudged to be lying, in the short and long-term from immediate death, to loss of freedom, incarceration, punishment, loss of job, loss of prestige, loss of citizenship, denial of privileges, and other more and less serious effects.
Misplaced Confidence and Cascade of Assumptions
As we’ve seen in the previous chapters, government and industry are now pursuing technology that claims the power to accurately detect deception (or something), using video scans of facial expressions and body parts, subjected to artificial intelligence processing. As with any bodily function-based technique, though, these are not useful or skilled at assessing credibility.
It is not a stretch to say that deception detection methods that use body measurements are best described as based on superstition and pretending. They have been adopted and continue to be used for multiple reasons—ease of use, tradition, personal charisma and political clout of proponents, and, for many, a misplaced infatuation with technology. All of these methods require a cascade of assumptions about human lying to be true. In fact, none of the underlying assumptions can be supported by reality.
During my career, and later when I studied the issue, I observed the use of various body-based lie detection methods. I began to identify the assumptions which must be true for the methods to be useful. Practitioners of bodily-function-measuring methods rarely discuss, or maybe are not even aware of, the assumptions that these methods are built on. In formulating HCCA, and differentiating it from the physiological methods, I’ve identified a series of assumptions that all physiological methods are built upon. I call it Clizbe’s Cascade of Assumptions.
Clizbe’s Cascade of Assumptions in Physiological Deception Detection
1. Lying is a well-defined true/false dichotomy of statements.
2. All people and all cultures view the true/false statement dichotomy the same.
3. A statement that is false is considered a lie by all people and cultures.
4. Lying is universally considered a bad thing to do.
5. Because it is bad, uttering a lie produces a physical reaction in all people of all cultures.
6. Physical reactions to lying are universal--the same in all people of all cultures.
7. The physical reaction to lying can be measured.
8. Measured physical reactions to lying can be interpreted by deception detection professionals.
9. Liars can be thus systematically identified by measuring physical reactions during a lie.
Each of the above assumptions requires the one before it to be true. If any of the previous assumptions is not true, then every assumption after is also not true. That is, if #1 Lying is a well-defined true/false dichotomy, is false, then all others are false, down to #9, Liars can be systematically identified.
My experience, observations, and study demonstrate that not one of the assumptions in Clizbe’s Cascade is true. From the first assumption, there is no universal psychological agreement on what is true and what is false. On down the line to the last: Liars cannot be systematically identified by body-measurement methods.
Stress or Lie?
All efforts to identify universal indicators of lies have fallen short. Research in deception detection is in its second (or third) childhood, struggling to overcome the baggage of mistaken beliefs accumulated over a century. There is not even a proven protocol to conduct research on deception detection that effectively mimics lying in test subjects. It’s like trying to develop a radiation detection machine, with no way of producing real radiation. Or creating a method to detect mice, without having a supply of real mice. Tasking Psych 101 students to pretend they are mice does not yield valid experimental results. Most laboratory experiments to detect deception are burdened with this fundamental weakness.[1]
As for stress identified by visual/audible cues, do these betray stress or deception, or something else? Are stress and deception the same? There is not a universal relationship. Not all people are stressed when they lie. And not all stressed people are liars.
Consider how badly wrong an attempt at deception detection goes, if the investigator thinks he’s picking up on cues to deception, but he’s really identifying stress in a subject. Let's try a thought experiment: Imagine that you are wrongly arrested for a terrible crime, say murder. A SWAT team swoops into your house in the dead of night, breaks down the door, holds your family at gunpoint, drags you out of bed, shackles you, throws you into the back of a police car. As you are dragged from your house, you see a squad of goons beginning to ransack your house and belongings. An hour later, you find yourself stripped of your identity and dignity, wearing a baggy orange jumpsuit, sitting across the table from two deception detection experts. The geniuses begin their interrogation--establishing baselines, building rapport, blah, blah, blah.
How are you feeling at this point? A little stressed? Are you exhibiting any signs of stress? Are you mentally focused, alert, functioning normally? The experts chat with you about mundane matters. They think they’re identifying your baseline behaviors.
If you've been honest, then that's as far as we need to go. Looking for indicators of stress in interrogation/interview subjects is probably worse than flipping a coin to determine veracity. Of course, they are stressed! They're in an orange jumpsuit facing two goons who are (falsely!) accusing them of murder!
The use of bodily-function-based techniques believed to detect deception is commonly seen in conjunction with coercive interrogation methods. The common use of these approaches has been a large factor in the proliferation of miscarriages of justice. These techniques can result in subjects suffering implanted memories, or making false confessions. The wide-spread acceptance of these methods, and their use by authorities, misleads judges and juries into accepting results of these useless techniques as valid or scientific.
False Confession: A Lie by Definition
One indication of the extent of bad theories and methods in deception detection is the huge problem of false confessions. Law enforcement interrogators, the supposed experts of this practice, can be focused on obtaining a confession--not on obtaining the truth. When subjected to stressful situations, guided by manipulative interrogators, and offered incentives to cooperate, people have falsely confessed to heinous crimes. Added to those cases are the subset of people who falsely confess for their own motives.
Some interrogation methods are designed to mislead and pressure subjects to confess. These techniques are powerful, so powerful that they lead subjects to confess falsely. Methods that were standard for deception detection and interrogation for many years are actually confession coercion.
If there were any foolproof way to tell the truth from a lie with a machine, then there would be no false confessions. False confessions—people admitting to acts that they did not commit, usually as a result of interrogation, sometimes spontaneously—demonstrate that standard deception detection methods are not effective or reliable. Since the false confession is a lie by definition, a body-measurement method, if it was valid, would be signaling Lie while the subject makes the false confession.
Innocence Project and False Confessions
The Innocence Project researches and supports appeals of cases of prisoners wrongly convicted. Their cases include many false confessions.[2] Many of their cases are only resolved with DNA evidence that was not available during the initial trials. The prisoners, once they’ve made a false confession, are trapped in the system.
According to the Innocence Project:
It’s hard to imagine why an innocent person would confess to a crime they didn’t commit, but research shows that false confessions can take place due to law enforcement’s use of intimidation, force, coercive tactics, isolation during interrogations, deceptive methods that include lying about evidence, and more. An innocent person may also falsely confess because of increased stress, mental exhaustion, promises of lenient sentences, or challenges with understanding their constitutional rights. Children, people with intellectual disabilities, and people with language barriers are left particularly vulnerable due to this lack of comprehension.
On average, people who falsely confessed were interrogated for up to 16 hours before admitting to a crime they did not commit (research shows that the reliability of confessions is greatly reduced after a prolonged interrogation). In some cases, they were convicted despite the fact that DNA evidence clearly contradicted their supposed involvement. In these instances, prosecutors conjured theories persuasive enough to convince juries to vote guilty, even though DNA evidence strongly supported innocence.
Case Study: Gary Gauger
Gary Gauger was condemned to death for the murder of his parents. After an 18-hour interrogation, police lied to him, and prodded him to produce a hypothetical story explaining how the murders were committed. They presented this to the court as his confession. Four years later, motorcycle gang members were recorded by an informant, discussing their roles in the murder. They were convicted. Gauger was freed.[3]
False Confessions and Interrogations
A PBS Frontline investigative report, The Confessions, details the harrowing story of four Navy sailors who falsely confessed to a rape and murder.[4] The program’s website lays out the background to the case. Four men, the Norfolk Four, confessed to a horrific crime that they did not do. The Frontline report details how the justice system goes wrong when deception detection is really confession coercion.
Danial Williams falsely confessed to rape and murder after 11 hours of interrogation.
Being in a small room, and you have a person sitting over across the table from you that's getting in your face, yelling at you, calling you a liar, poking you in the chest with their finger, and then turns around and says, 'Well, I can help you if you tell me the truth,' Williams explains. It went on and on and on throughout the night, with them calling me a liar, telling me I needed to tell the truth. And I kept telling them: 'I am telling you the truth. I didn't do it.' I kept telling them over and over. ... I should have stood my ground.
Williams and three others were eventually exonerated. One completed a prison sentence; the others were pardoned after 11 years in prison. Coercive interrogations, not focused on finding the truth, doomed these men.
The Reid Technique: Common Source of False Confessions
The October 2010, New York magazine article, I Did It, examines how the Reid system of interrogation was used to coerce a false confession from Frank Sterling.[5] After a harrowing all-night session, that began with a lie detector test. The interrogation ended 12 hours later, when Sterling falsely confessed to a rape and murder.
The Reid technique was created by a crime lab technician, John Reid, of the Chicago Police Department, in the 1940s. Reid’s innovations included variations on lie detector equipment and questioning. From that base, Reid established a specialty in eliciting confessions during interrogations, using a non-violent system. In 1962, he published a book laying out his system, the Reid Technique.[6] Reid and his company trained American and foreign law enforcement, intelligence, and military in his technique. The New York article explains the three phases of a Reid interrogation:
First, the suspect is brought into custody and isolated from his familiar surroundings. This was the birth of the modern interrogation room. Next the interrogator lets the suspect know he’s guilty—that he knows it, the cops know it, and the interrogator doesn’t want to hear any lies.
The interrogator then floats a theory of the case, which the manual calls a theme. The theme can be supported by evidence or testimony the investigator doesn’t really have.
In the final stage, the interrogator cozies up to the subject and provides a way out. This is when the interrogator uses the technique known as minimization: telling the suspect he understands why he must have done it; that anyone else would understand, too; and that he will feel better if only he would confess. The interrogator is instructed to cut off all denials and instead float a menu of themes that explain why the suspect committed the crime—one bad, and one not so bad, but both incriminating, as in Did you mean to do it, or was it an accident?
The police interrogators in Sterling’s case followed the Reid technique to the letter. And got their confession. He spent 19 years in prison. Sterling was set free after another man’s DNA was linked to the crime. He was awarded nearly 9 million dollars in compensation for the miscarriage of justice.
Memory and Lying
Some subjects who confess falsely may be convinced that they remember the acts of which they’re accused. Research shows that memories can be created, implanted, and reinforced. The connection between memory and credibility assessment is crucial, and worthy of further consideration.
Elizabeth Loftus, who we heard from earlier, debunking Ekman’s recovered memory microexpressions commentary, studies memory. Memory plays a key role in deception and lying. If you do not remember a fact or an action, is it lying to say you don’t remember? What if you remember something that is not real—a memory that resulted from a suggestion? Loftus’s research on memory has explored what happens when false information is provided to a person, and the person incorporates that false information into their memories. Is recalling that false memory lying? Statements of fact or experience are based on memory. If memory is flexible, and can be manipulated, what is lying? Can memory differentiate between truth and lies?
Loftus concludes that manipulating a person to accept a false memory with
… misleading information can turn a lie into memory's truth: It can cause people to believe that they saw things that never really existed, or that they saw things differently from the way things actually were. Once adopted, the newly created memories can be believed as strongly as genuine memories.[7]
Implanting False Memories
The relationship between truth, lies, and memory is complicated. Popular beliefs, and most lie detection approaches, take for granted that a vivid memory is true. However, people can be influenced to remember, even vividly, events that did not actually happen. False memories can be implanted by manipulators, therapists, or interrogators using suggestion tactics, and other methods. A later vivid recollection of such a false memory walks and talks like the truth. But is it?
False memories can lead to false confessions, and other complications. An experiment in 2015 gathered personal details from subjects’ childhood caregivers. Using these details, researchers pretended to be studying memory retrieval techniques. The researchers mixed real details from each subject’s childhood (caregivers’ names, friends, incidents that actually happened), with questions about a significant event (involvement in violence, a theft, police contact) that did not happen. In the first interview, no subject claimed to remember the event that did not happen. The researchers, pretending to help subjects recall a repressed memory, urged subjects to use memory-retrieval methods (context reinstatement, guided imagery, and visualization) at home, in preparation for the next two interviews.
After three interviews, 70% of participants …[had]… false memories of committing a crime (theft, assault, or assault with a weapon) that led to police contact in early adolescence and volunteered a detailed false account. These reported false memories of crime were similar to false memories of noncriminal events and to true memory accounts, having the same kinds of complex descriptive and multisensory components. It appears that in the context of a highly suggestive interview, people can quite readily generate rich false memories of committing crime. [8]
Loftus, who has studied implanted memories for nearly 50 years commented on subjects recalling past events: … just because a subject tells you that they have a detailed memory that’s very vivid, that doesn’t mean that it’s true.
If certain techniques, widely used by therapists, interrogators, law enforcement, and con men, can implant false memories, then what is memory? Can memory be relied upon as an indicator of truth?
This phenomenon is commonly seen, not only in recovered memory cases, but in people who recall details of alien abductions or past lives which can be produced by improperly administered hypnosis or other psychotherapeutic methods. As Dr. Loftus pointed out in her talk, commonly used treatment approaches such as guided imagination, dream interpretation, hypnosis, and direct confrontation based on other people’s memories are notorious for creating false memories in patients.[9]
The interplay between lies, truth, memory, and emotions is complicated. It is unlikely that we’ll ever have a simple, technological indicator of true/false. It’s important to be aware of these complications when assessing credibility.
Summary of a Century of Body-based Lie Detection Methods
Even as technical, body-based systems are shown to be as good as flipping a coin, body-based methods dominate many academic, government, and corporate communities that use the lie detection approach. New waves of the-latest-thing continue to gain adherents and funding. I believe that this focus on technological solutions based on body-measurements is mis-placed, dangerous, and a tremendous waste of resources. The record of about 125 years of hyped claims, followed by failures, speaks for itself. Even though body-measurement systems are in use today as lie detection methods, there is no evidence that the technical systems can deliver as claimed. And the results of such systems are not accepted as evidence in American courts.
[1] See my research protocol for testing deception detection methods for a potential solution to this dilemma: Clizbe, K. (2021). Research Protocol for Testing Deception Detection Methods, Techniques and Technology to Identify High-Stakes Liars. https://www.academia.edu/60945749/Research_Protocol_for_Testing_Deception_Detection_Methods_Techniques_and_Technology_to_Identify_High_Stakes_Liars
[2] https://innocenceproject.org/false-confessions/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gauger
[4] The Confessions. (n.d.). Frontline. Retrieved September 8, 2023, from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/the-confessions/etc/introduction.html
[5] Kolker, R. (2010, October 1). “I Did It” . New York. https://nymag.com/news/crimelaw/68715/
[6] Inbau, F. E., Reid, J. E. (1967). Criminal Interrogation and Confessions. United States: Williams & Wilkins Company.
[7] Loftus, E. F. (1992). When A Lie Becomes Memory’s Truth: Memory Distortion After Exposure to Misinformation. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1(4), 121–123. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.ep10769035
[8] Shaw, J., & Porter, S. (2015). Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime. Psychological Science, 26(3), 291–301. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614562862
[9] Vitelli, R. (2012, November 4). Implanting False Memories How reliable are memories of abuse “recovered” during psychotherapy? . Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/media-spotlight/201211/implanting-false-memories